How Did The Old Bank Hotel Increase Revenues By More Than 10%?

Entrepreneur Jeremy Mogford is the owner of Mogford Ltd, an independent company that runs two hotels in Oxford: the Old Bank Hotel and the Old Parsonage, each with a distinctive restaurant. The company also runs Gee’s, a fine dining restaurant in the town.

Jeremy is an eminently successful hospitality operator, having founded Browns in 1973 with an initial investment of £10,000, which, when he sold to Mitchell & Butler, comprised seven restaurants.

In 2009, the Mogford group implemented roomMaster from NFS Hospitality at both hotels.

Most amazingly, in very difficult market conditions, The Old Bank Hotel has now managed to increase revenues by a minimum of 10%; this as a result of better rate management using the Yield Management tool available in the roomMaster Premier Edition software. The Old Parsonage has seen similar increases since deploying the solution.

True Return on Investment

Ben Truesdale, General Manager of The Old Bank Hotel, points out that although revenues are increasing, occupancy has dropped. “It is absolutely astonishing,” he says. “The Yield Management module has paid for itself twenty times over.”

“It’s interesting,” he continues, “because we did deliberate about spending the money to get the superior edition of roomMaster, but the new solution paid for itself within one or two months. The benefits far outweigh the costs involved.”

The Benefits of Automated Processes

Ben explains how the hotel used to manage yield manually. “We basically had a set 5 or 6 rates to base this on, and would revisit these once a week to see which ones needed to be re-set, and on which days. But we missed a lot like this. We couldn’t keep an eye on all the dates using this manual process. We knew how to do it but were lacking the tools to do it effectively.”

“It’s fair to say that managing yield manually is quite difficult,” Ben continues. “When the process is automated, if you have a run on rooms you can set the application to increase rates on each room as bookings come in – or however you want. You never lose the opportunity to set optimum rates. Rates are now updated automatically with every room sold – if we set it this way.”

Now that the hotel is able to utlise roomMaster′s Yield Management module, they are able to do a much better job, and in much less time. “This is the way to up your revenue,” says Ben, “but you do need to know your market; you cannot manage yield if you don’t have this knowledge. If you do – then roomMaster is a fantastic and very useful tool.”

“Most hotels are yielding now. They have to in order to survive, so roomMaster allows us to remain competitive in our market,” notes the General Manager.

So How Does It Work?

Mogford is able to see these increased revenues due to roomMaster being linked to channel management systems at the hotel. They use both Navarino/SynXis and Siteminder. The moment the rates change in roomMaster, they are automatically passed on to the channel management systems – which in turn update the prices in various channels such as booking.com, laterooms.com, hotels.com as well as a variety of GDS systems.

When the prices change in roommaster, they automatically change on the hotel’s web booking engine. This way the hotel maintains rate parity across all its channels and gets the most ‘bang for its buck’.

The Integrated Yield Management Approach

“We’ve seen very challenging market conditions for hotels in the last three years, and are delighted that our affordable and integrated approach to Yield Management is helping mid-sized hotels cope with reduced occupancy,” comments Luis Desouza, Managing Director of NFS. “We believe Yield Management should be part of a core hotel management system, not an expensive add-on.”

Mogford Ltd began its partnership with NFS in 2006, with the implementation of the Aloha EPOS System at its restaurants. roomMaster was added at a later stage. The two hotels in the group now benefit from an outstanding F&B Management solution that is fully integrated with NFS’ property management system, which is making a real difference to the business.